Mrs May: Deadline or Deadbeat?

Theresa May has announced her intention to confirm March 2019 as the date on which the UK will leave the European Union; and has indicated an intention somehow to establish that date in law.

On the same day, a spokesperson for the European Union has said that unless there is to be a 'hard border' in Northern Ireland [which no party in Ireland will accept; and which the British state cannot afford to enforce] Northern Ireland must remain under EU jurisdiction permanently: regardless of what arrangement will apply to the rest of the UK. The Democratic Unionist Party, whose votes in the Commons keep Mrs May in power, thus faces a huge dilemma. The one thing that can deprive them of their majority mandate in Ulster would be for them to be seen on the island of Ireland as the group who  would vote to enforce a hard frontier. However the DUP may decide that dilemma, there is a bigger one facing the UK government.

Can any UK government [Tory, Labour, fragile coalition - LibLab - or 'grand' coalition of three or more parties] contemplate bearing the cost or the odium of renewed conflict in Northern Ireland? This is an intractable question, to which I have drawn attention on previous occasions. The headbanging Brexiteers have put Ireland into the 'too difficult' file, as they busily fantasize about trade deals with countries that have no particular interest in doing Britain a good turn. Ireland has been a determining factor in British politics for centuries: and it is worth remembering that whenever the British think they have found an answer to 'the Irish question' the Irish change the question.

By a vote of 52% to 48% the UK population voted in favour of ceasing to be a member of the European Union: without any deep understanding of the implications of that question. Now that the ramifications of just a few of the implications are becoming clear, the proportion of the literate classes [especially of the civil service, which would have to administer Brexit Britain] that favours Brexit has declined rapidly.

Millions of people - including me - voted 'out' in genuine opposition to the ever-closer union of a corrupt political dictatorship [masquerading behind a facade of democratic institutions]; we also wanted to cock a snook at the British political class [represented by Cameron, Clegg and Osborne] who were the principal advocates of Remain and of austerity. None of us wanted to ruin the country economically. Some 'out' voters accepted assurances that that the world was open for free-trade deals on WTO terms. Some - me included - believed that, in the unlikely event of the 'outs' winning the vote, a continuance of the [Liberal-supported] government that had given us the referendum would negotiate terms that enabled stable economic life to continue. Nobody expected David Cameron to be such an utter coward as he proved to be. Nobody much minded what happened to Osborne: as he has demonstrated, he could move on to adopt half a dozen lucrative careers at once. On the day of the referendum nobody contemplated Mrs May being the prime minister; and we could not have conceived that she would place herself in thrall to people who actually would be prepared to see the British economy dismembered: starting with the crown jewels in the City of London.

Today, in the Silent Ceremony at Guildhall, a new Lord Mayor of the City will be installed. By the end of his year, the die will have been cast as to whether Britain will survive [and thrive] as an economy in association with the European Union, though with greater facilities for trade with the rest of the world.

Yesterday's two announcements - Mrs May's 'firm deadline' for leaving the EU, and the EU's comments on Ireland - are incompatible and will almost certainly ensure that no kind of Brexit happens in March 2019. Meanwhile, Mrs May's government looks increasingly unlikely to survive even to March 2018. The Tories will implode, even if the DUP do not simply repudiate their voting pact. Mrs May's chances of winning a by-election, even in the leafy home counties, are vanishingly small. Politics has become far too exciting; and that is before the inevitable mass movement against economic suicide begins to capture the headlines.

Sugar, Hunger Bonds and a Sour Thought

British  Sugar has undertaken a survey of the nation, which shows that two-thirds of us do not know that sugar is grown in the UK. It is also noted that during the emergence of the 'obesity pandemic' the UK's consumption of sugar has gone down by 1.5%, notwithstanding the growing population. It is far too simplistic to blame 'sugar' for the obscene sights that now infest our streets.

Goldman Sachs, the 'vampire squid' of Wall Street, has recently bought a very large tranche of Venezuelan state bonds at approximately one-third of their face value. Although the bank did not buy the bonds directly from the Venezuelan authorities, this purchase has bolstered the whole market in such bonds and thus has eased the situation of the violent and incompetent 'socialist' government. Within Venezuela there are shortages of food and medicines, and the government is increasingly dependent on the security services as it ignores election results which have produced a 'dissident' parliamentary majority. At least sixty demonstrators have been killed this year. Given the already awful reputation of the bank in humanitarian circles, the description of this asset as 'hunger bonds' has elicited a great deal of adverse comment. Whether it can have any impact on the future behaviour of the giant squid is problematical.

And now to the main point, the 'sour comments'. Theresa May rushed back to Downing Street after the London Bridge/Borough Market terror event, to appear 'prime ministerial' at the lectern on Downing Street. Over six years as Home Secretary she cheerfully administered the full measure of cuts in the police service that was required by the Osborne austerity programme. She presided over the control of spending on information gathering on and surveillance of 'radicalised' suspects. Now she recognises that some flexibility needs to be given to increase the capability of the police and security agencies; but she apparently intendeds to go ahead with damaging cuts in the armed services.

Donald Trump recognises that jihadist groups must be rooted-out of the middle east, as far as is feasible, even though that raises the prospect of retaliatory measures being brought to Europe and the US; with Europe more obviously in the firing line than the US. If Britain does not have armed forces sufficient - and sufficiently well equipped - to take part in external operations, that will not protect the UK from the 'vengeance' of jihadically-inclined people who are already living comfortably as UK citizens. Britain is firmly lodged in its 'special relationship' with the USA, and this includes taking a share of the comeback for American interventions in Islamic states.

Islamist groups described the children killed in the Manchester suicide bombing as 'crusaders'. The demonology that has been formulated among these people is deeply rooted, and platitudinous verbiage about 'British values' and 'our way of life' will have no mileage at all with the zealots. Mrs May's grand words have no weight, because she has no back-up to offer within the context of her policy horizons.

Jeremy Corbyn has a shameful record of giving aid and comfort to virtually any terrorist group that has emerged in the past thirty years. He has opposed almost all measures to contain terrorists, on the clever but indefensible pretext that such measures are 'administrative' devices which do not create a judicial process that would enable the would-be terrorist to legitimate his [or her] status. His personal standing in such matters is deeply in the mire; but he and his party have a more rational proposal now for dealing with the terrorist threat. They are proposing a significant enhancement of the resources for police and security, and they oppose the cuts to the armed services. Labour does this in the context of policies to expand the economy, and thus the country's capability to pay for the forces. The fact that much of the investment would be undertaken by the state, using borrowed funds, is no exception to the long history of policy that enabled the country to finance two world wars and the equip for the cold war.

The Conservatives stand against historical experience, while Labour is concordant with it. That is not their popular image, but it is the contemporary fact.

Mrs May's Caps

Theresa May has been a lifelong fashionista who asked [on Desert Island Disks] for a lifetime subscription to Vogue: which makes it odd that she has chosen to wear for much of this election campaign tweedy jackets that hang oddly around her distinctive anatomy. She looks to me like a chargehand beater on some minor grouse moor; in which case a cloth cap would complete her ensemble perfectly.

Her election campaign has featured two very un-Tory caps: one on energy prices to households and the other on immigration to the post-Brexit UK.

Critics and commentators from the whole political spectrum have pointed out - as nauseam - that a cap on energy bills was one of the policies that vanished with the 'Ed stone' when Labour lost the last General Election. Mrs May has decided that it is an election winner. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, any change to the model of privatisation brings into question the rationality of the whole concept. To cap a major segment of the pricing structure is a fundamental move away from the Economists' model of privatisation: in the direction of arbitrary government interference that smacks more of a dictatorship than of a free market; or even a balanced mixed economy such as the UK enjoyed in the period 1950-70.

Electricity bills, in particular, are increased by the huge subsidies and tax reliefs that are given to windmills, solar panels and other forms of 'renewable' energy: at the expense of the customers. It is a result of government policy that these charges are loaded on the consumers, threatening household budgets and the future of energy-intensive industries, notably iron and steel. In these circumstances, it is simply silly to make another intervention and hand over the implementation of the idea to an 'economic regulator' that is meant to apply the nonsensical models that were fashionable in the 'eighties. No doubt Mrs May will win the election, and will have her way on electricity bills: and there will be plenty of time to rue the decision before the next General Election. Eventually, the whole idea of economic regulation of utilities will have to be stripped back to first principles and replaced.

Mrs May's other cap - on net immigration to the UK - has attracted a lot of comment on the assumption that there is almost certainly a deep psychological need for her to persist in this policy, which has featured in the last two Tory manifestos and fallen to her, as Home Secretary, to 'fail' to implement. I have been told by British-Asian friends that some of their communities voted for Brexit on the assumption that if European immigration was restricted there would be more room for greater Asian migration into the UK. The statistics of the last several years show that net migration from outside the European Economic Area into the UK exceeds EU citizens' immigration to the UK very significantly. So even an extremely 'hard' Brexit will not reduce immigration to anywhere near the level [less than 100,000 net per year] that Mrs May is proposing as the maximum. Her refusal to exclude international students from the tally is simply silly: damaging to university finances and to the balance of payments generally, and significantly weakening the talent pool within the country [if she can pull it off].

Industry and commerce are struggling to explain to this purblind person that the country unconditionally needs to call upon a wider pool of skills and talents than the UK itself is generating. As long as the austerity regime continues - especially if resources are being misdirected to harebrained schemes such as grammar schools - the British educational system will not produce the skills that are needed. Fake apprenticeships are an expensive travesty: they do not produce skilled workers, but young people who are even more sure that the system has cheated them. The immigration cap, if Mrs May actually tries to implement it, will poison the whole Brexit negotiation and cause deep anger among immigrant communities: as well as real detriment to the economy [not least, the creative industries]. There is a real peril in this crazy concept.